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Italian Camica Lace Insert Seams

Posted on Feb 2, 2018 by in Camica, Construction, Informational, Italian | 0 comments

My first attempt at this camica was over a year ago (Oct 2016).  I used cotton gauze which was super stretchy and super prone to fraying/unraveling.  I failed to properly do a double fold on my edges before putting the insetion lace in and it frayed like crazy. Furthermore, I followed the pattern exactly and had a tube that was HUGE and I could not smock in enough to fit me, despite being a larger girl.

I restarted this project several months later (start of 2017) and have been working on and off on it since (Maybe I’ll finish it before War this year?!).  I found a crushed voile of unknown fiber content that frayed significantly less, had a lovely, sheer drape, was super affordable (less than $2/yd), and machine washable.  I also modified the pattern to use all narrow panels; so, my entire tube diameter will be about 100 inches(give or take after all the fancy seams) instead of closer to 140 inches.

To correct the fraying I did a half inch double fold on the long edges of my panels, pressed, pinned, and sewed that down prior to adding the insertion lace (Step 1, seen from the wrong side).  Then I pinned the insertion lace down with the edge of the insertion lace right at the edge of the fabric.  Next I sewed a straight line right at the fabric edge where the insertion lace ends and the border you sew on begins and the very edge of the fabric (Step 2, seen from the wrong side).  Finally, I zig-zag stitched down the edge of the insertion lace border to hold it down and hopefully prevent the border from fraying too badly as I noticed it was very susceptible to fraying (Step 3, seen from the wrong side).  Once one side is done, you repeat on the other side to complete one full lace inset seam. (Step 4, seen from the right side).  Yup! that’s 6 passes through the sewing machine for ONE seam!  As the project was all various shades of white, here is a series of technical drawings showing the steps of the construction of one side of this seam and the completed seam.

 

To see the final product of this seam treatment for my camica, here is a photo of the wrong side of the finished seam. As I mentioned, white on white on white is super hard to see.

Here is a photo of the right side.  Aren’t those lace inset seams snazzy?

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